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Why is it naive to believe that sport and politics have nothing to do with it?

2020-09-01T23:48:09.806Z


On August 26, NBA players protested the Jacob Blake case and reopened the eternal debate on whether or not it is right to politicize the sport. Before them, the Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos or the American football player Colin Kaepernick already spoke politically on the field of play


"Do yourself a favor: play and shut up."

This was the expeditious advice a Fox News commentator gave LeBron James in October 2018. By then, the Akron, Ohio power forward had embarked on his personal crusade against police violence and systemic racism.

A political awareness that, over time, has ended up transforming him into one of the strongest detractors of President Donald Trump in the world of sports.

That is why Trump detests LeBrony and has made him a target for hostile tweets, where he compares him to Michael Jordan, a model athlete, with a pristine image, in the opinion of the president, and who never made the "mistake" of mixing politics and sports.

A year or so after they exhorted him to meddle in their affairs (and after spending almost all that time to, above all, not shut up and continue playing), LeBron James has once again been in the eye of the political and media hurricane.

The now Los Angeles Lakers player has been one of the most visible leaders of the team that NBA players promoted on August 26 in protest of the Jacob Blake case, the umpteenth example of the extent to which being African-American continues to be a sport high risk in the United States.

"Sport seems to me an extraordinary metaphor for life. For a group of elite athletes to stop competing in order to make a collective complaint of a flagrant injustice that is reproduced over and over again, as is happening now with racist violence in the United States , conveys a very eloquent message with a huge impact "

Xavier Pujadas, professor of Sports History at the Ramon Llull University

The

playoffs

resumed last Saturday, after a protest pause that lasted just 72 hours.

But those who closely followed the negotiations between players, franchise owners and league officials say that the competition was on the verge of being definitively canceled.

In the end, after long deliberations, a middle way was imposed, driven by the mediation of personalities such as Barack Obama or Michael Jordan himself.

LeBron and company have agreed to continue competing in their Orlando bubble until one of the teams still in contention is proclaimed champion, at the end of October.

But in return they are demanding that the league commit unreservedly to what they believe really matters, the social change agenda pushed forward by the Black Lives Matter movement.

As Jaylen Brown, guard for the Boston Celtics, said during the decisive meeting, "Better to stay here and turn every game we play into a formidable showcase for our ideas than to go home and stop the world listening to us."

Shouldn't sport be politicized?

Tell Jesse Owens.

The Alabama athlete, the grandson of slaves, the son of immigrants expelled from the Deep South by poverty and racism, won four of the most politicized gold medals in history at the 1936 Berlin Games. Owens respected the guidelines of the Olympic Committee Americans: During his stay in the capital of the Third Reich, he kept a low profile, no strident gestures were allowed and at no time did he speak of politics.

But his success on the track and the color of his skin were devastating arguments against the racist propaganda of Adolf Hitler, who aspired to turn those Olympics into the empirical demonstration of the superiority of the Aryan race.

Although Hitler did not hand out the medals, he had adopted the custom of approaching the podium to congratulate the winners.

One of his trusted men, the architect Albert Speer, assures that the Nazi supreme hierarch stopped frequenting the podium as soon as the African-American dominance in the athletic events became evident.

But he did run into Owens when he was leaving the stadium with one of his medals around his neck.

He greeted him briefly, with icy courtesy.

That greeting, which the cameras did not catch, is sports history.

And, yes, politics too.

Politicized to the core?

Jesse Owens won the jump gold at the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin.

Photo: Getty

It is not necessary to go back to Ancient Greece to see that sport and politics have almost always gone hand in hand.

Modern sport, developed and consolidated in 19th century England, was never intended to be an innocent and aseptic form of leisure, but rather an educational tool for the wealthy classes that, over time, also became a formidable vehicle for indoctrination. popular and a weapon at the service of the British imperial project.

Then it was exported to the world and adapted to other social contexts without losing that deeply political character that has accompanied it since its origins.

As Xavier Pujadas, professor of Sports History at the Ramon Llull University, explains, “sport was born with an inherent ideological perspective, it has been exploited politically by regimes of a very diverse nature and, in addition, it has in its essence the competition between identities national, local or elective, between coexistence projects, ways of being and ways of living ”.

In the opinion of Pujadas, the exhortation to "play and shut up" received by athletes committed to their ideas like LeBron James is not far removed from the cynicism that dictator Francisco Franco displayed in his famous phrase: "Do like me, young man, don't get into politics. "

For Pujadas, those who insist on the convenience of separating politics and sport generally respond to two lines of thought: “On the one hand, the naive.

That of those who believe against all evidence, but in good faith, that a social activity, such as sport, can truly be separated from its political dimension.

And on the other, the interested party.

That of those who aspire to exercise a certain monopoly of politics (and sports) and, therefore, want athletes, actors or intellectuals to keep quiet so that they can be the ones to speak without anyone answering them ”.

This false apoliticism is "typical of authoritarian regimes, but also of conservative democracies that poorly tolerate dissent, dissent and transformative activism."

For Miguel Fernández Ubiría, author of books in which sport and politics are mixed without the slightest modesty, such as

Soccer and anarchism

or

The Shield of the Sewn Ball

, "demanding that one thing be separated from another is sovereign stupidity."

And not only because “almost everything can and should be mixed”, but also because “politics and sport are part of the society in which we live, sport cannot be intended to function as an independent bubble”.

In Ubiría's opinion, “it is curious (or perhaps not so much) that this rejection of politicization is almost always wielded by the right and the extreme right.

They, who have traditionally made use of sport, especially football, as a political tool so that people do not think about other really vital issues ”.

In an article published on the Al Jazeera website, Faras Ghani asks to what extent “using sport as a platform for activism and social change” can be useful or rather counterproductive, given the “rejection” that many of these attitudes arouse

Ubiría has an opinion formed on the August roster in the NBA and the subsequent agreement for the competition to resume: “In principle, it seemed good to me that these billionaire athletes were finally involved with their peers and denounced the brutality, violence and the injustice suffered by blacks in America.

Unfortunately, the plant, as expected, has come to almost nothing.

They have ended up returning to the fold demanding in return a series of concessions that are basically useless.

But what could we expect from them?

Pujadas admits that the way in which the crisis has been resolved may be "a relative disappointment."

Above all, because its character as an "act of emotional and spontaneous response", unplanned, led to foresee that, this time, "the players were going to go all the way, acting with a rare forcefulness in initiatives of this type, which usually be more facing the gallery ”.

In the opinion of Pujadas, "paralyzing the league in a definitive way would have transmitted to society the powerful message that there are situations in life in which sport takes a backseat even for sports professionals."

However, the sports historian clarifies that “what they have ended up doing is still a more or less reasonable compromise solution, an attempt to make sincere activism compatible with a certain realism”.

After all, "no sports establishment is going to end racist violence overnight, and neither can a group of professionals be required to take their commitment to their ideas to the extreme of giving up on continuing to exercise their professions."

That would be "setting the bar for social activism very high."

Rather than wondering whether or not NBA players have done enough, one might ask "why other athletes are doing, in most cases, much less than they."

Retaliation and witch hunts

In an article published on the Al Jazeera website, Faras Ghani considers to what extent “using sport as a platform for activism and social change” can be useful or rather counterproductive, given the “rejection” that many of these attitudes arouse.

Ghani cites the example of LeBron James, but also that of Colin Kaepernick, the American football player who chose in 2016 to kneel during the United States anthem in a hitherto unprecedented act of protest.

The journalist highlights the enormous impact that Kaepernick's gesture had.

But he also insists on the retaliation suffered by the player, who saw at the end of the season how his contract with the San Francisco 49rs was terminated and no other NFL team decided to sign him, largely out of fear of the reactions that his hiring it could stir up sponsors and fans.

Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos (right), first and third respectively in the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics, used the medal ceremony to wear black gloves in solidarity with the Black Panthers.

Photo: Getty

Ghani then reviews what happened to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Olympic medalists in Mexico 1968, who took advantage of the medal ceremony to wear black gloves in solidarity with the Black Panthers.

Today we remember theirs as a brave and pioneering gesture, but the truth is that they were "booed by the public present in the stadium, criticized with little nuance by the press around the world and expelled from the United States Olympic team."

Your crime?

Politicize a sporting event, the Olympic Games, whose supposed "purity" has always been tried to preserve at all costs.

For Xavier Pujadas, the examples of Smith and Carlos and others like them demonstrate the extent to which "conservative institutions such as the International Olympic Committee or FIFA actively persecute and penalize activism until it ceases to generate controversy."

It is a logic inherited to a great extent from the Cold War, “when the only way to make possible a great international competition between ideologically opposed countries was to create a fiction of neutrality and apoliticism that would make all those involved feel more or less comfortable ”.

Compete in silence?

Today, the IOC and FIFA tolerate in their competitions the active condemnation of racism, sexist violence or homophobia as long as it is done “in an aseptic way and that they can control, which in the end makes it anecdotal and redundant. and they deactivate it of any true capacity to promote social change, ”says Pujadas.

Instead, any controversial position is prohibited "in the interests of that deeply concerned ideal of preserving the purity and neutrality of sport."

American football player Colin Kaepernick knelt during the United States anthem in a protest in 2016. Photo: Getty

To Ubiría, these restrictions on the freedom of expression of athletes seem “something aberrant that restricts personal and collective freedom, but taking into account the mafia background of institutions such as those you mention, IOC, FIFA or UEFA, it does not surprise me that make those kinds of decisions.

At the end of the day, they are the power in sport ”.

Ubiría claims a very different ideal of sporting purity, which has to do "with phenomena such as the current emergence of amateur football around the world, which is proposed as an alternative to commercial football."

This is a “very interesting trend but one that most people are unaware of” and that the author relates to what happened in places like Latin America in the first decades of the 20th century, “when within the anarcho-syndicalist movement great numbers were created. quantity of popular soccer teams in an experience that was very enriching for the proletarian class ”.

This type of popular sports activism with community roots, and not the one that privileged people like LeBron James can exercise, is what Ubiría considers really interesting "and with an undeniable potential to promote social change."

Pujadas agrees that the true transforming impulse should be sought, above all, “in grassroots sport, which was a school of conservative values ​​in the past, and to some extent continues to be, but it can also serve to educate in different values , such as integration in diversity, solidarity or social commitment ”.

However, Pujadas also appreciates the powerful example of professional athletes engaging in social causes related to basic humanism and human rights: “Sport seems to me, above all, an extraordinary metaphor for life.

That a group of elite athletes stop competing to make a collective denunciation of a flagrant injustice that is reproduced over and over again, as is happening now with racist violence in the United States, conveys a very eloquent message and with a huge repercussion " .

Even if it's for a day.

Although activism breaks into professional sports very occasionally, but do not cancel it or stop it.

There is no need to silence LeBron James.

There is no reason to take the basket away either.

Playing and talking are, in his case, two ways of being in the world that complement each other perfectly.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-09-01

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